Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Comments
+1 to just playing along with a metronome (digi or analog) with no accent on the 1, and letting your inner-ride be your guide! Forget programming it. Just play it!
can you achieve 11/4 or 13/4 in gadget?
One of my pet peeves as well (not being able to support non 4/4 time sigs). Auria Pro has a tempo and time sig track and you can make changes there.
I'm still wondering if there's any "sound" (pun alert) statistics about how much music (say, in %) uses time signature or tempo changes... I'm considering adding both to Xequence, if I only knew from hard numbers if it's worth it
(in the genre I mostly listen to (EDM), I haven't ever heard a single song that wasn't 4/4 and the same tempo throughout, but that's probably considered cheating...)
https://www.joytunes.com/blog/learn-to-play/odd-time-signature-examples-musicians-love/
http://theeviljam.co.uk/2014/07/31/famous-songs-in-slightly-odd-time-signatures-a-guide-to-rhythms/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musical_works_in_unusual_time_signatures
you know my steeeeez
Yes, really all DAWs should support any time signatures, changes of time signature and changes of tempo. My very first computer sequencer - Dr.T - could do all of that in the late 1980s so there should be no excuse.
Auria Pro supports a plethora of odd time sigs and can change tempo and time signature at will, don't know if any other does this as well.
In terms of pop, I'd imagine that's a pretty low percentage, although 3/4 hasn't been unheard of. Led Zepplin's Kashmir is 6 over 4, and Dave Brubeck's Take Five is, well, in 5. Certainly there's tons of classic and modern jazz that's in 3, 5 and 7.
My personal favorites like Yes often used odd signatures and tempo changes. Belew-era King Crimson was a complete playground of odd times over odd times - Fripp frequently dropping an eighth every second pass through dual arpeggios 11/11, 11/10 etc.
Certainly tons of African and Mid East music is completely built around odd times and polyrythyms. Kora players play a separate time with each hand - which just blows my mind.
And tempo change wise - most any classic symphony will have many!
Time and tempo changes are far more "common" (pun intended) than we know. See the Wikipedia reference already posted just above. Time signatures, tempo changes, tuplets, crochets, and alternate tuning systems puts the eyebrows on music IMHO.
I own Xsequence but can't use it until it gets at least Time signature and tempo changes. (Your sequencer is very good btw). Would love to also know the PPQN (pulses per quarter note) and the ability to enter my own tuplets or other subdivisions of notes in a given time signature. As a long time cakewalk Sonar user (RIP) these things where easily done. Even my old Amiga sequencers supported these concepts.
Good primer here on midi timing and sequencers..
http://midi-tutor.proboards.com/thread/14/importance-midi-timing
While some existing iOS midi sequencers support time signature and tempo changes it always feels a bit clumsy to me. But bs-16i and MIDITrail apps do play and display pretty accurately midi files I have with many embedded time signature and tempo changes. Here's a midi started on Amiga Bars and Pipes and finished on Cakewalk sequencer back in the late 1990's. Played using MIDITrail and screen recorded on a 2017 iPad. Lots of time signature, temp change, tuplets, and other techniques (like [7:4] above 7 notes which means playing 7 sub divisions of the original 4).
just one image to answer this question .. it's screenshot from upcoming Nanostudio2
hint: do you see "time sig" row ? :-)
This is really cool!
Yep, NanoStudio 2 will do it, and MIDI FX, and.......some other things.
Now there is just one thing missing......where is that damn app????
@SevenSystems I'm not clever enough to write music in different time signatures on purpose (I tend to compose freeform then figure it out later) but often it turns out to be a different time signature— sometimes throughout and sometimes in parts. EDM may be a big player in the statistics, but locking everything to 4/4 is doing a disservice to creativity in general, like an eight color box of crayons, and since Xequence is primarily a linear sequencer, there are probably many types of music being made with it.
Having a fixed tempo is a similar hindrance. I like pregnant pauses in songs at times, and they can't be a bar long, or a fourth of a bar long. They have to be the perfect length, whatever that may be. Tempo ramping is big too— I'd like to smoothly ramp up/down in tempo. It's an immensely useful effect when you need it.
Maybe Modstep 2?
There's lots of things that my earliest sequencer (Cubase VST, ca. 1997) could do that even the most acclaimed DAWs on iOS still can't do, so, yeah... hope we're getting there some day
But does it work? I've read various horror stories on the forums of messed up MIDI parts and projects when you use those features...
The PPQN is 192... "custom" grid subdivisions have been requested a few times already and they're on the TODO list
So maybe this thread has persuaded me to investigate if I can somehow stick tempo and time sig changes into the app... although it has a mechanical EDM heart
Great to hear you are considering custom subdivisions. How will this be implemented? I would be happy with being able to specify number of ticks from current clock position (tick being one pulse of the ppqn). Any chance you would consider doubling that ppqn to 384
?
Great news regarding tempo and time signature changes. I have a biological heart which varies tempo often
@SevenSystems Thanks for giving it a look. I'm guessing it's no easy task, or Cubasis would support it by now.
I think that the biggest issue for cubasis is how to mangle audio clips where a for pure midi sequencer the task will be much more easy.
I guess, but it's not like Link, where the tempo can change dynamically. Now that's a computational headache. If you edit a song's tempo track, the app adjusts the timestretch enabled files to fit, and what isn't timestretch enabled would just plays faster or slower. Off you go.
I tend to think they're not doing it because they can still get away with not doing it. You can't be a self-respecting desktop DAW without these features, but iOS DAWs can still slide because the platform isn't considered serious enough to bother.
GarageBand has tempo changes. The means to get them is a by recording free form in Music Memos and importing into GB. The main problem then is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to edit the tempo changes or add other ones but it is quite a nice way to get a more natural feel.
yeah people we need listen to more this amazing music
I would have thought that instead of the available options in the grid dropdown (32, 16, 8, etc.), you would just be able to enter any integer? Or is that not enough?
The PPQ could be doubled quite easily, but even Cubasis (the "pinnacle" of DAWs from a multi-million dollar company) only has 96
no I mean, just curious, can the human ear even hear such short time intervals, or do you work at very low BPM, or am I missing something altogether?
@aaronpc @mschenkel.it indeed, there's more sequencers that DON'T have it than ones that do... the problem is that the return on investment (if I may speak in economic terms for a second
) is very small. It's simply not used or needed by lots of folks, and at least from my not-yet-very-investigative viewpoint, the implementation overhead is significant. With a fixed tempo and grid, you have very simple mathematical, linear relationships both between ticks (pulses) and wall-clock time, and ticks and beats/bars. You can throw all that out the window as soon as tempo or time sig tracks are involved.
@SevenSystems Fair enough. Low hanging fruit and all that. Is Xequence locked into 4/4, or can you have another time sig, provided it's the same throughout? I was considering getting it, but not if it's so 4/4 intensive as that.
@aaronpc nah you can have any time signature you want as long as it's the same throughout.
Cubasis has only 48PPQ, @SevenSystems. Only Auria Pro and Garageband have 960PPQ on iOS (talking about DAWs). It's a question of precise timing and realistic grooves.
Hmmm... at 120 BPM and 48 PPQ, one pulse is 10 ms, so yeah, that's really low-resolution and clearly audible. At 192 PPQ we would be at 2.6 ms, which would be on the border of indiscernible to most people I assume... 960? Half a millisecond... insane!
It makes a huge difference with odd tuplets or quantifiable beat swing...
The following is quoted from this link. A good reasoning why a ppqn of at least 384 is desirable.
http://midi-tutor.proboards.com/thread/14/importance-midi-timing
Some random thoughts.
One more aspect of timing which I forgot to mention before is tempo, and it's affect upon note transmission when taken together with the PPQN of the file.
PPQN is Pulses Per Quarter Note, in other words the number of clock pulses or "ticks" that a quarter note is divided into by the Sequencing software.
In order to be able to "hold" eighth notes, our software must have at least 2 ticks per quarter note so that the 8ths can be correctly spaced apart in time. For sixteenth notes, twice that (4). For thirty-second notes, twice that (8), and for 64ths twice that (16). If we want to hold 64th triplets, three times that (48). If we want these triplets to be sequenced slightly early or slightly late, to give a "human feel" then we probably need to multiply by another 4 or even 8. So a PPQN of 384 would give us a lot of flexibility for humanising our file.
I mentioned previously that at 120 bpm, with a PPQN of 480 it could result, very approximately, in one instruction per thousandth of a second. That happens to be, again approximately, the transmission speed of the MIDI interface.
A simple explanation. The MIDI interface runs at 31,250 bits per second. Why? Try dividing 1,000,000 by two several times. The timing oscillators in early computers ran at 1MHz.
A MIDI "Note On" message is three bytes long. But, in asynchronous data transmission, a start bit and a stop bit are needed at the front and back, respectively, of each byte, making ten bits per byte for transmission. So that's 30 bits per Note On message. 31,250 divided by 30 is 1,041. Hence roughly 1000 messages per second.
However, if we have a very slow musical piece (a largo) it might go at 60 bpm. At 480 PPQN this would result in one message being transmitted every 500th of a second. In this case we might want to increase the files PPQN to 960.
But if we have a very fast paced piece at 240 bpm, clearly even at 480 PPQN we could overload our MIDI interface by trying to transmit 2 messages every thousandth.
So there's a clear case to adjust the timing of the clock to suit the music file being created. However, not all sequencers allow this to be done, nor do they all allow a PPQN as high as 960.
Read more: http://midi-tutor.proboards.com/thread/14/importance-midi-timing#ixzz52lxjDCwH